What’s the Point? Contextualizing the Significance of the Turpin Lithic Assemblage

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Improving and Decolonizing Precontact Legacy Collections with Fieldwork: Making Sense of Harvard’s Turpin Site Expedition (Ohio)" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

A long-standing point of contention has been the degree of continuity and change between the Middle Woodland (ending AD 500) and Fort Ancient periods (beginning about AD 1000). The intermediate Late Woodland period has become a placeholder but is clearly of great interest as it was a time during which peoples transitioned into corn-farming villagers. Here, we address this issue by focusing on diagnostic projectile points from a legacy collection from the Middle Woodland Turner site and the Late Woodland/Fort Ancient Turpin site housed at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University. The assemblage is relatively large but unfortunately, given the poor quality of the expedition, most of the points are without intrasite provenience. To combat this, we have revisited the site and systematically excavated many different areas within the site with which we can more accurately examine the significance of this important transitional site.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Improving and Decolonizing Precontact Legacy Collections with Fieldwork: Making Sense of Harvard’s Turpin Site Expedition (Ohio)   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38989.0